This just in from the research team: most innovation is meaningless. Or, worse, serves to diminish meaning. That’s ‘meaning’ as in the raison d’etre of human lives. Humans being meaning-makers.

Or at least that’s what I thought we were. Now it seems we spend the majority of our innovation time making lives more convenient. Or more superficial.

This is what the high-level summary of the six-month analysis looks like:

The 2×2 matrix plots meaning and innovation. ‘Innovation’ is defined in our usual ‘successful step-change’ terms. The top row of the Matrix shows there has been no change in the overall 98% failure rate of innovation attempts. That overall number has barely shifted in all of our analyses over the course of the last eight years.

Now we can break the number down further into successful innovation attempts that were meaningful versus those that were not. The ratio of meaningful-to-not is revealed to be 0.6/1.4, which means 30% of successful innovation attempts deliver increased meaning, and 70% are either meaning-neutral or diminish meaning. The biggest offenders in this 70% are innovations aimed at increasing the convenience of consumers. The food and beverage sector looking particularly bad. From food delivery apps to eat-on-the-go-breakfast-drinks, from microwave puddings to easy-peel oranges, here’s an industry that seems to have largely forgotten that the preparation and consumption of food is supposed to be a meaningful act.

The ratio of meaningful to meaningless gets even worse when we then look at the bottom row of the matrix, with a shade over 20% of failed innovation attempts seeking to increase meaning, and the remaining 80% don’t. Looking at the ‘meaning’ columns of the matrix reveals that, overall, 79.4% of innovation attempts are meaningless and 20.6% are meaningful.

That feels like an awful lot of wasted effort to me.

The ‘meaning’ data comes from the PanSensic ABC-M tool, which we used to analyse consumer feedback on several thousand novel products and services launched in the last two years.

More details will be presented in the May issue of the Sytematic Innovation e-zine. Meanwhile, I thought it would be good to plant the ‘meaningless’ seed in peoples’ minds ahead of time. Smile.